As you all know, installing Net_SSLeay.pm-1.22 using CPAN is easy, and works great.

My problem is that for the first time, I need to develop a script that supports SSL on windows, and ActiveState perl 5.8 uses PPM as the package installer, and I cannot get CPAN to work in this windows installation, and I don't know why. Obviously, PPM does not have the SSLeay package up in the activestate repositories.

The only option I can think of is to use Visual C++ 6.x to compile the entire perl distribution with SSLeay in it and then compile my scripts to executables that i can place on windows machines.

I only have 1 year of college C++ experience and I dont really want to do this.

i have made some progress installing it, but I am still stuck. i am really close though, and it does not involve calling Active State.

basically, I used Active State PPM to install the newest CPAN::Bundle and then i typed "install Net::SSL" which will also automatically install SSLeay "IF" it were successful. i also unzipped and installed c:\openssl

my problem now is that the "make test" does not work. basically, during the CPAN setup, it asked where my tar.exe, gzip.exe, nmake.exe, and other programs were located and I skipped through that section and took the defaults, which resulted in CPAN not being able to build things.

Can anyone recommend what I need to do to setup those non-windows programs? I don't want to have to buy a copy of MKS toolkit. I do not have the nmake.exe that comes with Visual C++6.0, which i also cannot afford to buy. Should i find a free distribution of unix tools. Or , should i scrap it altogether and just use Cygwin?

I've seen this solution recommended many times; I've also seen Cygwin recommended as a solution probably as many times.

Personally, I've never needed a module that wasn't in the PPM repository (one of the reasons I chose to not upgrade to ActivePerl 5.8.0 is that 5.6.1's repository seemed more complete) or a module that wasn't happy just being copied into the directory tree.

Because of this, I may not be the one to ask if it's the "Windows Perl" way.

Unfortunately, I cannot install any of them. When I try typing 'install Net_SSLeay' in PPM, I get the following message: Error: no suitable installation target found for package Crypt-SSLeay. This is because the PPM packages that are available are UNIX packages and not Windows packages. Here is my 'describe' output in PPM:

Ok, basically, after I installed the PPM package, I still had to find some pre-compiled .DLL files from the openSSL distribution. The hard thing was finding a SSLEAY32.DLL file that came in a package with a matching LIBEAY32.DLL file. I wanted to skip the work of trying to compile this thing. Anyways, I found the stuff, and finally got it working.

The following script works, just edit it to point at your favorite site that delivers a SSL cert, and it should accept it and make a connection. I tested it and it works fine for me:

####OUTPUT SECTION: #following is a generic unprocessed output of the gateway's response. #you will need to change the code to format it to your site's look and feel #and give your users a more informative result.